Dante's Inferno

Dante Alighieri · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages giving the nine lines written over the gate of Hell from the Inferno, canto III, in the original Italian with Mandelbaum's English translation set beneath. The frontispiece is William Blake's picture of Dante and Virgil entering Hell, and the page is headed by Eliot's remark that Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, with no third.

A headnote explains why the passage sits in this library at all: Blavatsky closed her article "Occultism versus the Occult Arts" with the first three of these lines, and the same lines are quoted again in The Caves and Jungles of Hindostan. The inscription itself speaks in the voice of the gate. Three lines beginning "Per me si va" name what lies beyond it — the suffering city, the eternal pain, and the road that runs among the lost. The next three name who built it, and are the reason the passage is so often quoted: justice moved its high artificer, and its maker was divine authority, the highest wisdom and the primal love — so that Hell is presented as a work of love rather than of cruelty. The last three set it outside time, since nothing was made before it except eternal things and it endures eternally, and close on the line everyone knows: abandon every hope, you who enter here.

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